Want a career in politics? Don't have kids.

A candidate for Australian prime minister is boasting her lack of children as a political asset. Now there's a change!

Political aspirants everywhere have traditionally presented themselves to their electorates as "normal" people. Wives and husbands, daughters and sons, even pets, have been trotted out as tokens of the ordinariness that makes for acceptability with voters.

But Gillard (46) has turned the convention on its head. She says that, for women but not men, children are a hindrance and a distraction from the biggest prizes in politics. She said all the country's 25 prime ministers would have struggled to make it to the top job if they had been born female.

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Lastly, I enjoyed this letter to the editor from an 81-year-old Arizona man who sympathizes with people who choose not to have kids. He writes, "One would have to give some very serious thought to bringing children into this world, a world that is quickly going down the tube."
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